There are free apps to watermark your images on the go using your iOS device, as well as more robust apps that allow you to batch watermark your images using your Windows or Mac computers, one of which includes many other features aside from just watermarking.

WatermarQue

The free Mac/Windows app WatermarQue, allows you to select the font, size, angle, colour and formatting of the watermark that you will use. Once you have settled on the appearance of your watermark, which you can see previewed in the program, you can select a target folder on your computer where the watermarked images will be saved. Supported formats include BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, PSD and TIFF. Exported images can be saved as one of four formats, JPEG, PNG, BMP or PICT.

Drag and drop the images you want to watermark onto the blue box labeled, ‘Drop here’, if you want to preview the image with the watermark before applying it.

Dragging and dropping is also used to add images to the list of files to be watermarked.

Select the folder that you want the watermarked images to be saved in, and once you’re ready, click the “MarQue it” button.

WatermarQue is convenient to use because of its user friendly interface and because it makes it easy to batch watermark images. The distinct disadvantage to using WatermarQue is there seems to be no way to alter the opacity of the watermark, so if you’re looking to create a subtle watermark, this app is not for you.

Impression

iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users can benefit from the free app, Impression [iTunes link], which allows you to watermark images saved on your device.

Select the image you want to watermark from your saved photos or photo library.

Enter the text you want to use as your watermark.

Determine the opacity and increase or decrease the size of the watermark using the pinch and pull method, after which you can drag the watermark to your chosen position.

Unfortunately, watermarking using Impression is done one by one, with no batch feature, and watermarked images are saved as a new file in your photos.

Impression is also available for iPhoto and Aperture, but unlike the iOS app, they are not free.

JetPhoto Studio

JetPhoto Studio is a great free Mac/Windows app that allows you to do more than just watermark your images. It allows you to create albums, publish your images to the web, offers some image editing options and much more.

As far as watermarking is concerned, it offers a slightly different method to the other programs listed here. Rather than use text to watermark your images, JetPhoto Studio allows you to use a PNG, TIF or BMP file to watermark your images.

The first step is to create a new album, determining the album’s physical location on your computer.

Go to the Thumbnail tab and drag and drop the images you want included in the album into the window.

Next, go to the Actions tab and select Web Ready.

This will open a window in which you can determine your watermark and its position, and then batch watermark images, as well as resize them if need be. The watermarked images will be exported to the location you selected when you first created the album.

If you’re looking for more free methods to watermark your images, whether online or offline, take a look at these articles:

• How to Batch Watermark Images with Jouba Converter
• 4 Ways to Watermark Your Images Online

How do you watermark your images? Let us know in the comments.

Image credit: Shutterstock

The most obvious offline method of watermarking your images is using Photoshop, and while at first, it might not seem to be the easiest, it gives you the most flexibility and allows you to watermark your images exactly the way you want to. And once you create your watermark using Photoshop, you can easily automate the process using your very own Photoshop action, and even batch watermark images.

Creating a Text Watermark

To watermark your image, first select the colour you want the text to appear in – we would suggest white. Next, select the Text tool, and type in the text you want to appear as your watermark.

Once you’ve determined the size of the text, and the placement, you’ll probably want to make the text less opaque. Go to Layer > Layer style > Blending options.

Under Blending Options, drag the opacity bar down until the watermark looks the way you want it to. Usually an opacity of about 50% should do the trick.

The watermarked image will look like this.

You can also use a similar method with logos and images, preferably in PNG format. Simply open the image or logo you want to use as your watermark, copy and paste it onto your image in Photoshop, and as described above, decrease the watermark’s opacity.

If you want to get creative, play around with some of the other options found under Blending options such as Bevel and Emboss, to create a more elaborate watermark.

If you want to rotate the watermark to appear diagonally across the image, select the Marquee Tool, right click the text and select Free Transform.

Hovering the mouse over any given corner, you should see a small curved arrow indicating that you can rotate the image at an angle.

Creating a Symbol Watermark

Using the copyright symbol found under Photoshop’s shapes, you can create a very simple watermark that allows you to protect the entire image. This symbol can of course be replaced with any other shape you choose to use.

After opening your image, create a new layer.

Next, using the Shapes tool, select Custom Shapes.

Select the copyright sign, and draw the shape on your image, determining the size and colour. With a symbol like this, it’s possible to place it over the entire picture without detracting too much from the image itself.

When using a symbol as a watermark, using the additional Blending Options can really come to life. For example, with the copyright symbol, select Soft Light from the drop down menu, and make sure that Bevel and Emboss is checked.

The watermarked image will look like this.

Another method is to create the shape, using black as your colour, and then applying the Emboss filter to the shape. After drawing the shape on your image, go to Filter > Sytlize > Emboss.

When Photoshop asks you if you want to rasterize the shape, click OK.

Next, go into Layer Styles, and from the Blend Mode drop down menu, select Hard Light.

The watermarked image will look like this.

If you want to add text beneath the copyright symbol, use the same method.

Create an Action and Batch Watermark

If you want to create an action, to make it easier to batch watermark images, record the steps that you choose to take and watermark your images at the click of a button.

To create your action, follow the instructions outlined here, with the steps outlined above for your preferred watermark.

Once you’ve created your action, to run the action on an entire folder of images, go to File > Automate > Batch…

From there you can select the source folder that contains the images you want to watermark, the action you want to use, and where you want to save your watermarked images.

And of course for those of you want to make life as easy as possible, there are free Photoshop watermark actions available for download, such as PSNick’s action downloadable from DeviantArt.

Do you have any tips on how to watermark your images using Photoshop? Let us know in the comments.

There are some stunning free WordPress portfolio themes, many of which are WordPress 3.0 compatible. That said, with a few extra plugins, you can turn your WordPress blog into the ultimate portfolio. Whether it’s tweaking the appearance of your portfolio, protecting your images, or making it easier to bulk upload images, WordPress plugins have you covered.

Disable Right Click Menu

One of the main reasons so many photographers opt for flash portfolios is so that their images can’t be stolen. If you’ve decided to use a WordPress blog for your portfolio, there are other ways that you can protect your images. For one, you can disable right clicking on all of your photos with the No Right Click Images plugin. Installing it on your blog will simply take away the right click menu from any of your images. There are no settings to play around with – the plugin works right out of the box.

Add a Watermark

Another way to protect your images is to apply a watermark to your photographs. Rather than have to add a watermark to each individual photo (and permanently alter your file in the process) with a WordPress plugin, you can automatically add a watermark to all of your images. With Watermark Reloaded, you have complete control over how the watermark appears, choosing the font, the size, colour and placement.

You can also control which size images the watermark will appear on – from the thumbnail to the full-sized image.

Exclude the Date

Unlike blog posts, it is not at all necessary to include the date of upload on a portfolio entry. In fact, you’ll find that any professional photographer’s portfolio is date free.

Unfortunately, there are no plugins that deal with this in the most efficient of ways. Unless your theme already removes dates, Date Exclusion SEO makes it a little bit easier, but to really make use of the plugin, you will most probably have to tweak your theme as well.

Date Exclusion SEO removes the dates from your posts, tag, category and home pages. It also gives you the option to replace the date with any text of your choice.

While Date Exclusion SEO removes the date, it doesn’t remove the text preceding it. You will find that you’re left with something looking a little bit like this:

Unless you can find a creative way to deal with the gap in the wording, you will have to manually edit your theme’s code, making the plugin obsolete.

For example, in the default WordPress theme, Twenty Ten removing the following code from Single.php will remove the date from individual posts.

When using this method, be sure to backup your WordPress theme before editing it. Not only will have you have to edit the file, Single.php, you will have to edit every instance in your theme where the date appears. In most themes, this will include Single.php, Page.php and Index.php. A detailed guide on what to look for can be found here.

Create Galleries

Uploading images to WordPress can be a tedious task. Using a plugin like NextGen Gallery streamlines the process, while also giving you a few extra options and a little bit of eye candy to boot.

With NextGen, you can create easily create galleries, viewable as a slideshow or lightbox, add image or text watermarks to your photos, and best of all, upload entire zip files of images to your galleries in one go.

NextGen also takes the pain out of resizing your images, allowing you to set one specific size to be used for all images.

Once you create a gallery, make a note of the HTML code that will allow you to include the gallery in any given post or page in your WordPress portfolio. You can continue to add photos to any given gallery after it has been posted.

NextGen is as feature rich as a plugin comes, and should be compatible with any WordPress theme. Another advantage to using a plugin like NextGen is the freedom to use any theme of your choice, while benefiting from features usually found in portfolio-specific themes.

What plugins are you using on your WordPress portfolio? Let us know in the comments.

I certainly wish I did back when I fansubbed a music piece with some (as I was told later) metaphorically incorrect translations and later laughed when I saw the exact same, incorrect lyrics I had spent hours researching for in another similar video. As you can tell, there’s no real harm in spending a few more minutes protecting your work. It may even get you more motivated when you see your own logo in your videos that you’ll continue making videos!

So before we start with the tutorial, note that the first part of the tutorial focuses on adding simple text-based watermarks, and for the second part, we’ll add an image watermark or logo into our video using the code from some brilliant users at the Movie Maker Forums.

Adding A Text Watermark

If you want a simple text watermark, not a logo, of your username or name in the lower portion of your video, you can get started right away with one of the built-in Titles.

First, start up Windows Movie Maker. Press Ctrl + I (or click on Videos under Import in the left sidebar) to import your video from your computer.

Drag your video to the timeline. Click on Title and credits under Edit in the left sidebar and then, click on Title on the selected clip.

Type your username or the text you want to appear as your video watermark.

Click on Change the title animation and choose Subtitle that appears under the first Titles, One Line section at the top of the selection box.

If you wish to position your watermark near the bottom right or left, click on Change the text font and color and choose the icon to align text right or left. You can change how transparent or opaque your watermark, as well as your font style (e.g. make the text bold or italicized), size and color.

Once you like what you see in the Preview (please note that the video player may take a few seconds to display any changes), click on Add Title.

Using the resizer (which appears when your cursor hovers on the edge of the title in the timeline), drag it across the length of your video.

You can preview your final video if you’d like, otherwise, press Ctrl + P (click on File > Publish Movie) to save the video to your computer.

This is what the product looks like with the simple text watermark.

Adding An Image Watermark Or Logo

First, if you haven’t already, create your image watermark. If it has a transparent background, it would look even better, so use Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.NET or most web-based image editors to achieve a transparent background (which the built-in MS Paint can’t do). Save it in .PNG or .GIF format in >C:\Program Files\Movie Maker\Shared\AddOnTFX\.

If you don’t have the Shared or the AddOnTFX folder, just create the folders with those exact names. You may also save your image in .JPEG format but note that it can’t contain a transparent background. If you already have your logo saved in your computer, make sure it is saved in either file formats, or you can create a new copy and save it as a .PNG or .GIF file in >C:\Program Files\Movie Maker\Shared\AddOnTFX\.

Now head to this FX Archive page and select either Windows XP Logo Creator or Windows Vista Logo Creator depending on your system.

Select the location in the video where you want your logo to appear.

Then choose the Screen Size which you can quickly find out by looking at your video file’s properties under Dimensions. If your video has different dimensions, just choose the closest numbers or (follow the original forum thread to learn how to modify the code). Then type in the dimensions for your image watermark or logo file.

Now, in the Logo filename, where the default name is image.gif, type whatever the name is for your watermark or logo file, which you saved previously in .PNG or .GIF in >C:\Program Files\Movie Maker\Shared\AddOnTFX\.

In the Name of Title field, you can name it something like MyLogo. Copy the text that appears underneath.

Open Notepad, paste the text in and save as a mylogo.xml (choose All Files (*.*) in the drop-down menu for the Save as type field) in the >C:\Program Files\Movie Maker\Shared\AddOnTFX\ folder.

Open up Windows Movie Maker (or if you have it open, restart it to see the new MyLogo), import your video, drag it to the timeline and choose Titles and credits.

Choose Title on the selected clip and in the text box under Enter text for title, input a single space (this is important!), and click Change the title animation.

You should see MyLogo in the options. Select it and click Add Title.

Using the resizer (which appears when your cursor hovers on the edge of the title in the timeline), drag it across the length of your video. You can preview your final video if you’d like, otherwise, press Ctrl + P (click on File > Publish Movie) to save the video to your computer or share it with others or on YouTube!

If you look really hard, there’s actually more tricks that good ol’ Movie Maker has to render a pretty professional video, like the Zooming effects. Do you use Windows Movie Maker or do you prefer another video editor? Let us know in the comments about your preferences and why!

Watermarking is the process of overlaying an image or textual logo onto another image for the purposes of crediting the author with creating the image. Some websites and blogs use watermarks in case other sites try to steal or hotlink to their images. When other people now view these images they can attribute the proper credit to its real author.

Now that you know what watermarking is you can see how it can be a bother to batch watermark say 100 or 1,000 images associated with a post. You can open each of them in Photoshop or Gimp and add the layer, lower the opacity and then repeat or you can grab a batch watermark creator application for free that will make your life much easier.

One possible application is Jouba Images Converter and you can grab it here. You will also need to have Microsoft .NET Framework 4 installed on your computer. I recommend installing this before you begin your download. You can grab the installer here.

After you get it installed, launch the batch watermark creator application and you will then see a screen that looks like this:

Now the application also does conversions from one graphic type to another (like BMP and JPG) but if you click on the advanced options button we can find the option to add a watermarked image or a piece of text to every image loaded through the application.

As a side note you can convert your images to another file type and apply your watermark or you can follow the instructions below for JUST adding your watermark.

In this instance I added a line of text denoting my website as you can see below:

I chose my font and size along with my color and text as you can see above. Then I clicked OK. You can add an image just as easily by selecting watermark image instead of watermark text. When using an image you can also choose to rotate it or flip it vertically, horizontally or both.

Next I clicked on the big green plus sign to add a few files. You can also click the folder with the plus sign on it to select an entire folder. You can see both buttons in the screenshot below:

I then selected two images by clicking on the first and control clicking on the second:

That displays the images as thumbnails in the main window like so:

Make sure advanced options are selected in the convert to field and hit the convert button. That will bring up a box asking you where you want to save your watermarked images:

Accept the path they gave you or modify it with the browse button and hit start. It will run through each image and hopefully display this when it is complete:

In the past, we have also covered online watermarking solutions and I have also done a post on another watermarking application called WaterMarkLib.

What image batch watermark creator solutions do you use?